Children in Africa Are Starving
23 August 2026
If you grew up in the West in the 1980s, you were surrounded by images and rhetoric like the following:
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As a child, or even as an adult, you might be forgiven for thinking that such famine was natural in Africa and more or less permanent. There was never any discussion of why this was happening or what could be done to change it. It simply was. Children in England wear ties and short pants, children in America join the football team and the cheer squad, and children in Africa starve. It’s just what they do.
The blame-regime we now live under was at that time not yet fully formed, according to which the West, and in particular America, are directly culpable for all the world’s ills. But there was a vague and building sense of guilt which could be assuaged by giving money. The money would not really change anything, mind you, it would just keep the African children alive and starving for one more day. It was a Sisyphic new form of the White Man’s Burden. The African would never know food security and the West would never know a clear conscience. You would just keep giving and they would keep starving.
All this culminated in the “Live Aid” concerts of 1985. If these events did any good at all, it was to expose how corrupt both the African governments and the Western charity agencies were that funneled the guilt-money to largely nefarious ends (See Live Aid: The Terrible Truth in the July 1986 issue of SPIN).
Since then, aid to Africa has expanded greatly. It has also moved from private to public sources. You no longer see ads asking for your personal donations. Instead, your money is given without your being asked through transfers at the government level. What began as a populist guilt-assuaging movement is now a soulless clerical world order. And children in Africa still starve.